My Musical Life
By
Gary Goldschneider

I first began my professional career as a musician at the age of 14, when my cousin and bandleader-trumpet player David Weiss took me along as pianist on my first gig. From that time on in 1953 until I was twenty years old, I played Friday and Saturday nights with dance and jazz groups in the Philadelphia area, and up and down the East Coast of the United States. At the same time I was busy practicing classical piano, which I had begun studying at the age of 7 with pianist, composer and teacher David Sokoloff, student of Leo Ornsten and Josef Hofmann at Curtis Institute. While attending West Philadelphia high school and the University of Pennsylvania, I gave both classical recitals and participated in jazz concerts. These two areas of practical musical interest and study were joined by a third, that of the Broadway musical, in which I participated as pianist at summer camps and hotels in the Poconos and Catskills, and also with the Pennsylvania Players under Bruce Montgomery. Perhaps these three areas: classical, popular and jazz, and show music gave me the musical background needed for my subsequent works as a composer.

         Although my private studies with Lenny Payton, Dennis Sandole, Bernie Lowe, and especially my beloved high school music teacher Meyer Levin were important, I am largely self-taught as a composer, having drawn on my studies of orchestral, chamber and piano masterpieces from all musical periods. Likewise, growing up in Philadelphia provided a highly varied musical backdrop, attending performances of the Philadelphia Orchestra, many touring symphony orchestras and soloists, and particularly the appearance of jazz greats such as Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Roland Kirk and many others at Philadelphia jazz clubs. A truly great inspiration to me was my music classmate at West Philly High, McCoy Tyner, the extraordinary jazz pianist.

         Because of my orientation as a pianist and interpreter of the master composers, I was very reluctant to try my hand at composition, so in awe was I of their musical masterpieces. Already by the end of my teenage years I had resolved to limit myself to learning the complete keyboard works of four composers: Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart and Bach. Of course Liszt, Chopin, Bartok, Handel and Brahms continued to hold an important position in my repetoire and in my heart. My favorite composer has always been Franz Peter Schubert.

         I was also fortunate enough to have a musical mentor in my lifelong friend Arnie Fisher, through whose extensive record collection and deep involvement with classical composition and performance I was first introduced to Arthur Schnabel, Wanda Landowska, Arturo Toscanini, and many other great artists.

         Also, I had very little time to compose as a teenager and later in early adulthood, since my demanding professional studies at University were in pre-medical preparation and in English literature. While finishing up my baccalaureate requirements with a German course at the University of Vienna Summer School in Austria, I came in contact directly with the European classical tradition through my teacher, the eminent Viennese musicologist Hugo Zelzer. While living in London, before I attended Yale Medical School, I was able to hear many recitals and concerts by the world's outstanding performers.

         After attending three years of medical school at Yale, I returned to Philadelphia to finish up my master's work in English Literature and to continue my musical studies. While teaching Humanities at Drexel University I began piano study with Hungarian pianist Agi Jambor, student of Zoltan Kodaly, Leo Weiner and Edwin Fischer. Agi exerted a strong musical influence on me and exemplified the love and dedication which were necessary to become a classical artist.

Although my time at the end of the sixties was taken up with starting the music department at Philadelphia Community College while teaching there as Assistant Professor and giving many piano recitals, I found moments to begin to jot down melodies and develop longer improvisational structures. The first piece I wrote, in 1972, called For Isak and heard at the end of the Sinaia album derives from music of this period. My second work for piano, Waltz for Sara, has more to do with earlier work in jazz and popular music.

         Still, by the age of forty I had composed very little, perhaps the most ambitious piece being a series of ten short preludes for the piano.

Between the years 1970 and 1985 I travelled a great deal with my wife Antoinette and our growing family, living in Vermont, Philadelphia, California, Switzerland, Greece and New Zealand, to name only a few. During this time I made my living teaching piano and playing in clubs as a solo pianist. I also gave many classical recitals during this period, did some conducting of chorales, community and radio orchestras, had my own music show on KVMR radio (Nevada City, CA) and founded the first jazz department in New Zealand at the Nelson Conservatory of Music, where I was a faculty member.

         All of my varied life experience was to find expression in my compositions, most of which were written between 1983 and 1988. The most important of these include:

-       Two symphonies: Symphony #1 (Sierra Nevada Symphony in five movements) and Symphony #2 in D minor

-       Two piano concertos: Concerto #1 (One World Concerto) and a Sufi Concerto (Poem of Divine Love)

-       Many chamber works for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, piano trio, etc.

-       48 pieces for piano (The Well-Tempered Pianist) in all the major and minor keys, and a piano sonata in four movements

-       Two operas: Moby Dick (later changed to Call Me Ishmael), a 2 1/2 hour stage work for soloists, chorus, ballet and orchestra. The Tempest (first act of three completed)

-       A forty-minute ballet in twelve parts, Sun Sign Suite, for full orchestra

This considerable quantity of music was composed largely during two periods when my family and I stayed at the home of Dr. Harvey B. (Ted) Lyon in Nevada City California. During the first period in 1981-2, I also I presented my first cycle of the complete 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in Nevada City at the American Victorian Museum. Following this 9-concert endeavor over 9 months I presented all 32 sonatas in a single 12-hour concert in 1982, broadcast in its entirety by KVMR radio. [Subsequent performances of this Beethoven Marathon were given in Philadelphia Philadelphia at the Bourse building (1983), on Leidseplein in Amsterdam (1984), in San Francisco broadcast live in its entirety by classical station  KQED (1984), and at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (1999). Mozart Marathons of the complete 17 Mozart Piano Sonatas were presented in California, Philadelphia and Amsterdam.] During the second stay at Ted Lyon's home, from fall of 1983 to the summer of 1984, this huge structure of wood and glass (10,000 square feet under roof) proved a magnet to my compositional endeavors along with the patient support and spiritual teaching of former psychiatrist and god-oriented servant Dr. Lyon

         Thus between 1974 and the present I have been very busy as pianist, teacher, lecturer, performer and composer. However, the most unforeseen development of all succeeded in taking me away from my music almost completely between 1994 and 2001. In this effort I became truly the victim of my own success. With the publication of the bestselling Secret Language of Birthdays (1994), Secret Language of Relationships (1997) and Secret Language of Destiny (1999), published by Penguin-Viking, I became well known as an astrologer, cosmologist and developer of the theory of personology. Since each of these books is 832 pages long, I had little time during this period to compose, although I continued to practice and concertize at the piano.

         Finally, after completing the work on my latest book, The Astrology of Time, I resolved to begin my composing again. In the winter of 2001 I completed my first new piece for almost 14 years, called Sinaia: A Transylvanian Reverie, for chamber orchestra, and recorded it with Conrad Van Alphen conducting his Rotterdam Chamber Orchestra. During 2001 I did tours of Romania, Bulgaria and Russia with the One World Concerto, also recording it with Conrad Van Alphen conducting the Balkan Symphony Orchestra. Moreover, I have decided to bring my 2 1/2 hour stage work Call Me Ishmael  to Broadway and am presently building a team headed by singer-actor-pianist Kevin Rockower to present the work in New York. Finishing the instrumentation of this work (composition and first act instrumentation completed in 1998), is proving a great joy and is like revisiting a dear old friend after an absence of many years. 

 

My Musical Philosophy

 

My historical and cultural outlook on music is easily as important to me as my technical or compositional methods. I think it is important for any composer to place himself in the time period and cultural milieu in which he lives. It is my opinion that the so-called modern period of music began in 1911 with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, although many forerunners of this period can be seen in the late piano works of Liszt, the operas of Wagner, the music of Debussy and the symphonies of Mahler.

         Because the word "modern" is meaningless in naming a period, since what the Romans or any other civilization considered modern meant merely "up to date", I prefer to call the period from 1911 to 1970 the Experimental Period of music. Since that time we have been living in the period of World Music, the first period in which all the musics, styles and approaches are currently becoming synthesized into a single, recognizable, gigantic stream of music.

Personally, I never felt much kinship with the experimental composers of the 20th century. I preferred the atypical composers of this period, those who hearkened back to past traditions, such as Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Shostokovitch, and above all, Bartok, whom I continue the greatest of all 20th century composers. I do not look on Schönberg as primarily a composer, but as a great teacher of harmony, a traditionalist who loved the music of the master composers, and sought to redirect the direction of music through an entirely innovative approach in composition.

         Because of being unsympathetic to the music of the experimental composers (such as Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Xenakis, etc.). It was not until the advent of minimal music (Riley, Glass, Reich, which begins the period of World Music) that I felt able to relate with what was going on in contemporary classical music. Of course I was heavily involved with all forms of jazz and improvisational music, which had been steadily developing during during the experimental period (1911-1970). Indeed, improvisational music had had outlasted this period and became one of the most important links to the current period of world music (1970-present). The influence of rock music in the sixties also helped to bring the experimental period to a close, since most of the world's musical energies and interested were galvanized by rock, jazz and fusion musics. In this respect, I see the Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell and many, many so-called pop musicians as being the true forerunners of our World Music scene. Likewise, Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Yehudi Menuhin, Stefan Grappelli, and Astor Piazolla, South African musicians such as Hugh Masakela, Brazilian percussionist Aerto, Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul of Weather Report, Miles Davis, Pharaoh Sanders, John Coltrane, and thousands of others brought the music of their cultures and their highly individualistic approach into the mainstream of music.

Today, it is unthinkable that experimental classical musicians still dominate the academic world of music and dominate formal composition. They are simply dinosaurs, living fifty years behind the times. The great historical flow of music continues on, and now encompasses the musical traditions of every national and cultural group around the globe. For the musical snobs to call such music "pop" or "commercial" is simply to deny the fact that Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and Mozart were all "pop" musicians too, engaged in writing singable melodies and trying to make a living with their shows as best they could.

         The most important composer today is the man who personified the beginnings of world music in the late sixties and early seventies, Terry Riley. Having shown his compositional scope through a wide variety of approaches (solo piano, synthesizer, string quartet, vocal, major orchestral works) he has fused traditional elements in a highly groundbreaking, innovative approach to music. His composition In C can be viewed as the formal beginning of the period of World Music, in which minimal elements are built up around a single pulse tone, allowing almost any combination of musical instruments to take part, consonant with the pitches prescribed. Where John Cage was primarily a non-musician, philosopher composer, Terry Riley is an active performing musician, both keyboardist and singer, as Bach was. In fact, Terry Riley is the Bach of our time. Both composers gathered all the many strands of music before them, passed them through their musical consciousness and gave them out to the world. For Terry Riley those strands include: European Classical Music, Indian Classical Music, Pre-Well-Tempered tunings, Chinese, Japanese and Gamelan Music, American Jazz, New forms of Improvisation, American popular and rock music, and others. As the chair of composition Mills College he succeeded composer Darius Milhaud, also a forerunner of World Music. Terry Riley has amassed a huge oeuvre, including many recordings, and has accepted commissions from the Salzburg Festival (first since Mozart), Carnegie Hall, and most recently by NASA using sounds from outer space.

 

         My music is what music has always been: song and dance; melody, harmony and rhythm. I completely reject the idea that tonal music has been exhausted or that harmonic progressions are a thing of the past. Often I use a free-floating kind of tonality, at times using enharmonics as pivots, in which conventional triads can progress one to another without a tonic or principal tone to return to. Combinations of tonal and modal musics interest me, as do the development of new scales. What I call the "gagaku" chord (1.4.5.8; for example, C-F-G-C) or two interlocking fifths interests me very much in its structure and sound. Metrically, I tend to write in meters of 5, 7, 9, and 11, rather than in 3 or 4, although most rhythms can in fact be broken down into units of 2 and 3.

         I think we find that music which lacks true harmony (such as modal music) becomes very complex in rhythm and melody, while music which lacks a strong beat (such as Gregorian music) can become very complex in its polyphonic structure. Thus, in my music it is not always necessary to use a balance of melody, harmony and rhythm, but it can be advantageous to allow one of these to predominate at any one point, or on the other hand to allow one to almost disappear.

         I also like to write for the human voice and feel that all instruments have to be played with an awareness of breath and of singing. In my opera-musicals I use a lot of long-held tones, which are not that easy to sing despite the fact that there are fewer notes to deal with. In this I take my lead from musicians, particularly wind and brass players, who practice long-held tones every day for intonation, control, texture and color.

         I do not feel the necessity to spin out long development sections in my compositions. The use of repetition and often of small changes is important to me, and in certain respects I could be called a minimalist, at least in some of my music. But my principal emphasis is on melody, which abounds in almost all of my pieces. In this respect, I perhaps take my cue from Schubert, who it is often said found it easier to come up with a new melody than develop an old one. As a Gemini, the air element of melody is important to me and also the variety and change which is possible in the orchestration of works for large ensembles.

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